Governance user

The Governance domain allows companies to launch enterprise-wide new product introductions on-time and on-budget. Within Governance are these sub-processes: Requirements Management, Portfolio Configuration, Program Management, Decision Support Business Intelligence, and Compliancy.

ENOVIA Variant Configuration Central

ENOVIA Variant Configuration Central enables companies to manage the conceptual and commercial aspects of their products.

As products become increasingly complex with costly mechanical, electrical, and software capabilities, customers are demanding products that fulfill their unique needs at the lowest possible cost. To stay ahead of the latest innovations and market trends, companies must transition from traditional design processes to an approach that supports the definition of conceptual product architectures for highly variable configurations.

Unfortunately, many companies today have no simple mechanism for designing products that provide high market variation with technical modularity while controlling costs. With ENOVIA Variant Configuration Central, companies can define conceptual product definitions that can be reused across a multiple series of products, satisfy market specifications, and provide many possible optional capabilities. These conceptual product definitions serve as a framework for defining variant products that are configurable and drive the generation of engineering bills-of-material (EBOMs). As a result, companies can expedite the design process and lower costs while meeting customer demands still.

ENOVIA Variant Configuration Central enables companies to manage the conceptual and commercial aspects of their products. Product managers define and manage a master option dictionary that standardizes and enforce reuse of option effectivity across products and design.

These users leverage a single system architecture definition of the product as a conceptual framework to design and define the customization rules and parts to control custom choices and product costs. This approach to product definition helps companies get new product solutions to market faster, streamline the design process while minimizing design change and reducing development cost.

Master Option Dictionary

ENOVIA Variant Configuration Central increases product definition integrity and design efficiency by establishing a single list of features and options with usage rules for all process domains to adhere to. Seamless and immediate access to each model’s option list is available to VPM users when configuring any work-in-process structure in CATIA® and DELMIA®, allowing for a consistent option configuration definition across domains.

Product Line Definition

Product lines help product managers organize and manage the company’s portfolio of products. Product lines can specify a library of mandatory features and with usage rules inherited by all products without compromising organization security.

Product Planning/Product Evolution

Product managers plan the capabilities that each product must have in order to fulfill the needs of target markets and/or customers. Product managers can now plan the introduction of features and options for a given product using a date range. Each product’s adhere to the mandatory usage of the master option dictionary defined by each product line.
Before development starts, product managers plan product releases (“product revisions”) that meet market demands and incorporate new technology improvements to stay competitive and respond to customer needs. With ENOVIA Variant Configuration Central, product managers can innovate during the product planning activities by identifying the list of features and options that will be offered and need to be developed for each product release. Product managers can manage concurrently parallel product releases within the same product/model.

Generic Product Architecture

The generic product architecture is a multi-level configurable generic product architecture with 150% components with all possible options from which a range of family of variants can be derived from. Advanced configuration tools help minimize feature proliferation and maximize the reuse of physical parts. This enables companies to support mass customization in their products while facilitating the introduction of new products as well of quickly refreshing existing products with new technology and design content.

Configuration Rules

Configuration rules support different kinds of rules to enable automatic inclusion of components based on configuration options in the definition of the generic product architecture (150%). Simple and complex expressions are supported as well as a wide variety of rules, if-then, Boolean compatibility, resource rules, and variant inclusion rules for both products and parts. Mandatory rules can be defined at any level of the product hierarchy to enforce consistency and control the number of buildable combinations.

Product Variants

Product variants allow companies to reduce diversity by controlling the option variation based on target market, price or technical capabilities. Product sales can configure product variants but the option choices can be limited based on geography or option packages. The generic product architecture is used as a framework to introduce a family of related variant products with specific technical and marketing options.

Product Configurator

ENOVIA Variant Configuration Central helps companies with highly configurable products meet market customization needs. Sales engineers alongside its customers can collect the product customization requirements using a configurator interface. All standard and default option choices are highlighted for the user during the product configuration session. Engineers can use the product configurator for design analysis or feasibility improvements. In addition, system engineers can create partial configurations for further refinement by other functional groups.

BOM Generation

ENOVIA Variant Configuration Central enables system engineers to define a generic variant product architecture that is used as a framework for generating different kinds of BOMs. An EBOM) can be generated based on a specific product configuration for Engineering to Order (ETO) business models. A precise bill of materials (PBOM) is a flat list of parts based on a specific product configuration for build-to-order business models.
During EBOM generation, engineers can preview the selected standard parts based on the selected configuration choices. Engineers can replace standard part selections with custom parts to satisfy custom order demands.

Configured Build Management

Track and plan units ordered for specific product configurations. Product planners have the ability to plan and track the end-item builds for each customer. Product planners can assign unit numbers, serial numbers, SKU/PCU numbers and manufacturing sequence numbers for each unit ordered for a specific product configuration.

Issue Resolution and Change Management

As products enter into the development phase of their project, changes are inevitable but too many changes are cost prohibitive. A cross-functional change process helps system engineers manage and respond to feature changes systematically. ENOVIA Variant Configuration Central provides a choice of change management processes that provide immediate visibility to change requests while maintaining integrity of the original reported problem to the internal resolution.

Configuration Planning for Virtual Manufacturing

With highly configurable products, engineering must consider design alternatives for all product offerings and manufacturing engineers must ensure that product options can easily be manufactured at all manufacturing facilities available to them. Manufacturing planners can now define “Manufacturing Plans” as placeholders in ENOVIA to reference unique alternative process definitions in DELMIA®. Each ENOVIA ‘Manufacturing Plan’ represents a unique way to produce a product or a sub-system in DELMIA. Manufacturing planners can then apply configuration rules to logically select the proper DELMIA process plan based on configuration criteria. When used with ENOVIA® X-BOM Unit Tracking, the unit numbers (builds) can be associated to Manufacturing Plans for as-manufactured traceability.